Morning, Lab Coats! Morning, Everyone. Lots to get to today!

The saying goes, “Curiosity killed the cat.” I say:

Curiosity is the Mother of All Gifts.

Without it, how do we learn to roll over, to walk, to collect rocks (and put them up our noses), to ask questions (my three-year-old grandgirl — and every three-year-old I’ve ever known: “WHY?”), to survive?

I just made up that sentence about curiosity, that it is the Mother of All Gifts. Then I put it into a search engine and discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt thought the same way:

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

Rachel Carson said much the same thing — something I have felt in my bones, all these decades that Carson has been a hero to me (so much so that I wrote a book about her):

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Evidently, influence with a fairy godmother helps.

So I have decided: we have a fairy godmother in the Writers Lab — have you noticed, Lab Coats?

You stellar group of scribblers that keeps showing up in the Lab — you thrill me. lol. Well, it’s true. We are beginning to CLICK, and that is indeed a thrill, and a hope, and a wish, and something a fairy godmother probably waved a wand over, who knows.

You are of course more than scribblers, and yet that term is apt, too, for what we do in our Lives! when we write together and share our fears for our writing, share our strengths, and breathe into our bravery as everyone chimes in with “what’s working here?” for each piece. It’s fabulous. It’s curiosity. And we haven’t even gotten to workshops yet.

I have not met this fairy godmother, but I am convinced she exists. Invisible, perhaps, but a force to be appreciated and celebrated and nurtured. I personally will leave out homemade cookies for her this week. Or cake, even better .

I think she has a wand and a tutu, but that’s just me, or maybe she’s amorphous, or orb-like, and hey, that’s the thing about fairy godmothers, you may see her/him/it/them differently, and she is yet the same. Maybe we should name her.

I digress. To the curiosity:

In the Lab we are learning to “read like a writer” (I am ever learning this). It’s one of the writing skills that curiosity confers upon us. And boy do we have this skill developing in the Lab in such a strong and supportive way.

KUDOS, Lab Coats, for a fabulous Live! and for the suggestion that we create a Zine (YT, 5 mins, good) from what we wrote last week — an excellent way to celebrate the sense of community we have created, and a reminder, when we look at this Zine, of what storytellers we are — every one of us.

The “definition” of a Zine at this link is very good.

Chat has been very active this week with Zine thoughts and suggestions — and even one Zine that is already finished and posted for us — such encouragement, thank you!

So I’m going to use this Lab post for our Zine Assignment/Exercise, something we can work on in the three weeks before next month’s Live! so we don’t let this excellent idea drift away from us while we’ve got the juice for it.

ALSO: If you missed last week’s Live!, please feel free to check out the Chats about it, and to make your own Zine to contribute to our little book. We’d love to have you.

I’m looking forward to having my own Nutshell Library (good photos here) of individual Zines from Sunday’s Live.

I was going to write about research this week, as my research life has suddenly become an overwhelming morass of links and possibilities, and I thought I might write myself out of it, plus share some strategies for same, but a ZINE SOUNDS MUCH MORE FUN, so let’s do it, yes? YES.

Below are instructions, suggestions, and cheerleading to get you started — and finished.

Thank you, thank you, for being YOU. I think we need CAKE. I’ll put that below, too.

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